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Mexican America

Introduction

"Mexican America" is a sampling of objects from the collections of the National Museum of American History. The stories behind these objects reflect the history of the Mexican presence in the United States. They illustrate a fundamentally American story about the centuries-old encounter between distinct (yet sometimes overlapping) communities that have coexisted but also clashed over land, culture, and livelihood.

Who, where, and what is Mexico? Over time, the definitions and boundaries of Mexico have changed. The Aztec Empire and the area where Náhautl was spoken—today the region surrounding modern Mexico City—was known as Mexico. For 300 years, the Spanish colonizers renamed it New Spain.

When Mexico was reborn in 1821 as a sovereign nation, its borders stretched from California to Guatemala. It was a huge and ancient land of ethnically, linguistically, and economically diverse regions that struggled for national unity. Texas, (then part of the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas) was a frontier region far from the dense cities and fertile valleys of central Mexico, a place where immigrants were recruited from the United States. The immigrants in turn declared the Mexican territory an independent republic in 1836 (later a U.S. state), making the state the first cauldron of Mexican American culture. By 1853, the government of Mexico, the weaker neighbor of an expansionist United States, had lost what are today the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. In spite of the imposition of a new border, the historical and living presence of Spaniards, Mexicans, indigenous peoples, and their mixed descendants remained a defining force in the creation of the American West.

This relief print from The Magazine of Art dramatically illustrates the final moments before the execution of the Mexican Emperor Maximilian I in 1867. An Austrian noble by birth, Maximilian was installed by Napoleon III of France. French forces had invaded Mexico in 1862, after President Benito Juárez suspended payments on its foreign debt. Despite a major victory by Mexican forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, the French seized control of large sections of Mexico, including the capital. Maximilian was initially supported by Mexican conservatives in a backlash against the changes instituted by the Mexican War of Reform (1857–1861). However, once on the throne, his support of a free press, open universities, land reform, and other progressive ideas of the day proved to be out of step with his conservative constituency and the Catholic Church. Menaced by the government of the United States, victorious after its own civil war, and the rising success of Mexican nationalist forces, the French withdrew their military support of Maximilian, the last emperor of Mexico. This historic image is one of 45,000 artistic and commercials prints housed in the Graphic Arts Collection of the National Museum of American History.

The civilizations of pre-Hispanic Mexico recorded their histories, religious beliefs, and scientific knowledge in books called codices. Codices are folded pieces of hide or bark that depict both mundane and spiritual scenes with images, symbols, and numbers. Scribes and painters busily recorded daily affairs, filling libraries and temples with books throughout Mexico and Central America. The majority of these illustrated books did not survive the Spanish conquest. But indigenous scribes trained by Spanish missionaries continued writing. While these colonial-era texts were still filled with pictures, over time they referenced the visual language of older Mexican and Maya books less and less. These new books about community histories (including land titles) and secret religious traditions were sometimes bilingual, combining Spanish with either Náhautl (the common language of central Mexico) or a Mayan language, both of which were now written with the Latin alphabet. This image is from an Italian reproduction of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, a manuscript co-written by Spanish friar Pedro de los Ríos about 1550. It documents the religious beliefs, calendar system, traditions, and history of the Tolteca-Chichimeca culture of Central Mexico. Joseph Florimond, Duc de Loubat, (1837–1921) was an American philanthropist who published a series of reproductions of pre-Hispanic and colonial-era Mexican manuscripts, including the Codex Telleriano-Remensis. The Graphic Arts Collection of the National Museum of American History houses several reproductions of Mesoamerican codices published for study by French, German, and Italian scholars at the turn of the 20th century.